Tom DeMarco

Tom
DeMarco is a Principal of The Atlantic Systems Guild, a systems think
tank with offices in the U.S., Germany and Great Britain.He is a pastwinner of the Jean-Dominique Warnier Prize for “lifetime contribution to the information sciences.”He is a founder and past-president of the Pop!Tech Conference and a Fellow of the Cutter Consortium.

Tom is the author of nine books on management, organizational design, and systems development, and four works of fiction. His most recent business book is called Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behaviorwritten with five other members of the Guild. The book describes patterns
of behavior observed when groups of technical workers join together to
take on a substantial task. It goes a long way toward giving the reader
a working grasp of that all-important but little understood thing:
organizational culture. Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies was published by Dorset House in the US and Hanser Verlag in Germany.

The classic, PEOPLEWARE: Productive Projects and Teams (with co-author Tim Lister) is now in a third edition, published by Addison Wesley in 2013.

In 1997, he wrote The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management[Dorset
House Press], the story of a veteran software manager who finds he has
bet his life on a project deadline. The book is about managing as
though your life were on the line. Mr. DeMarco’s earlier works include Why Does Software Cost So Much? (And Other Puzzles of the Information Age) [Dorset House],, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement and Estimation, [Prentice Hall], and back in the Dark Ages, Structured Analysis and System Specification
[Prentice-Hall]. He has also written more than one hundred articles
and papers about management and the system development process.

Tom’s career began at Bell Telephone Laboratories where he served as part of the now-legendary ESS-1 project.In
later years, he managed real-time projects for La CEGOS Informatique in
France, and was responsible for distributed on-line banking systems
installed in Sweden, Holland, France and Finland.He has lectured and consulted throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Far East.

He has a BSEE degree from Cornell University, an M.S. from Columbia University, a diplome from
the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, plus an honorary Doctor of
Science from City University London (2003). In 1999 he was elected a
Fellow of the IEEE. He is the winner of the 1999 Stevens Award for his
contribution to software engineering methods. He is a Visiting Scholar
at the University of Maine, where he teaches an undergraduate Ethics
course.
His consulting practice is largely focused on organizational
development, development methods, and litigation support. Tom lives in
Camden, Maine with his wife Sally O. Smyth.

DeMarco’s Other Side

Tom
DeMarco’s most recent novel is A Ruby Beam of Light, Volume one of Dark World Chronicles. It is pure speculative fiction: the world at the brink of war when an unsettling new technology makes the weapons of war suddenly impotent. Sounds good, right? But the so-called Layton Effect also makes cars impotent, and planes, and anything that depends on internal combustion. Could society ever go back to the simpler days of the nineteenth century? Click to find out.

His first mainstream work of fiction is the comic novel, Dark
Harbor House. It was published by Down East Books in
2001, a gentle coming of age story that takes place in the late
1940s on
an island off the coast of Maine. Lisa Alther (author of Kinflicks
and Other Women) had this to say about Dark Harbor
House: “I missed this book whenever I had to put it down, and rushed to
get back to it.” Click here for reviews and pointersand here to download Chapter 1.